Psychological projection—you may have heard of it before.
Someone, with their self-qualified overconfident wisdom, may have even tried to
pin that diagnosis on you. The concept is often used pejoratively. Projection
activates itself when the human ego needs a defense against unconscious whims,
urges, and compulsions (both positive and negative). When your unconscious feelings
try to use your conscious beliefs as a sparring partner, don’t be surprised
when you find yourself trying to externalize the issues you know exist within.
It’s always society’s fault and never yours that you are who you are. Right?
Since projection involves denying certain qualities within yourself by
assigning them to others, maybe we can say that blame-shifting is either
synonymous or a close relative. [1]

A habitually rude person can
also habitually accuse others of being rude. Have you ever witnessed someone
like this? That doubles the rudeness, doesn’t it? Hypocrisy might be the first
word to come to mind. Even Jesus addressed something like this in Matthew 7:3-5
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no
attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can
you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the
time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You
hypocrite first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see
clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

The feeling of “it’s not me, it’s them” can be a very
powerful and persuasive feeling that helps you deny and repress your problem
instead of directly confronting it. Your friable ego may find projection to be
an easy weapon against your internal enemies but will not be quick to recognize
dissociation as a cost, especially when dissociative identity disorder is
involved. [2] Personal and political calamities are said to incite
psychological projection within normal people, but we can expect to witness
this phenomenon more often in narcissistic personality disorder and borderline
personality disorder when they operate at a primitive level. [1]

Projection is a concept that traces back to Sigmund Freud in the
1890s and his discussions on myth, religion, and primitive thinking. I
interpret Freud as saying that projection is a regression into savage,
primitive, animistic, childlike behavior. Projection is elementary in
self-development. Perhaps the best metaphor for describing projection is to say
that it is like a piece of technology throwing an image onto a screen. [3]

In the early 1900s, Freud discussed projection in his
psychoanalysis lectures that also discussed the nature of neuroses,
melancholia, narcissistic identification, delusions, paranoia and obsessions.
Now, none of this is meant to imply that if you are inveterately projecting
your unwanted parts onto others you must have a mental health disorder. But it
seems rather apparent to me that Freud regarded projection as sharing some
topography and dynamics with the aforesaid afflictions. I think it was Freud
who first informed us that projection exists in connection with the unconscious
and sets itself up in the ego. Your ego is treated like the object that you attach
to yourself or repudiate. The ego suffers collateral damage as we act upon
aggression and vengeance aimed at loved and hated objects. [4]

We have some interesting examples of psychological projection
spanning throughout human history. You may remember having read about The Salem
Witch Trials in high school; at least I do. Psychological projection of
repressed aggression was believed by John Demos to be cause for the mental
thralldom that the girls suffered in Salem in the Province of Massachusetts Bay
of 1962. [5] In case you are unfamiliar with the story, let me express this
quick synopsis:

Several girls who were exhibiting bizarre behaviors in Salem in
the Province of Massachusetts Bay of 1692 blamed a local slave, Tituba, and two
other females of spellbinding them. While being held under duress, Tituba
confessed to using witchcraft and knowing of other guilty parties. A massive
witch-hunt ensued, which helped the Puritans justify their personal vendetta
against the colonists who did not abide by their religious convictions. Many
innocent people were imprisoned and killed in that old village. Historians
believe the accused “were victims of mob mentality, mass hysteria and
scapegoating.” The story has been infamously used as a testament to the
consequences of collective frenzied behavior, fearmongering, religious
intolerance, and non-evidence-based thinking that can creep into our criminal
justice system. [6]

A lot happened in that mishmash, and maybe you can imagine the
indignation you probably would have felt while being accused of something you
did not do. Imagine being indicted because of the superstitious twaddle people
believe in and there was almost nothing you could do to avoid it in the first
place. Can you imagine the racing thoughts you would experience? Imagine every
eternal moment of helplessness and all the things you would have to say to
protect yourself back in the 1600s when people did not operate on the
innocent-until-proven-guilty principle? You would need to think quickly and
likely could not avoid being clumsy. Not much time would be available for
assorting all your arguments that could dissuade your detractors, because your
mind would be overwhelmingly clouded, and you would constantly feel tempted to
make up lies and believe them yourself, wholeheartedly. All eyes feasting on
you would have to be diverted by your blaming others.

In everyday living here in modern America and the Western world,
we may not be witnessing witch-hunts, but quite often life can make you feel
like there is a witch-hunt against you.

A romantic partner can make you feel like a dozen arrows are
pointing at you as he/she bombards you with protests. Maybe she/he is accurate
with those accusations, maybe not. To cope with the stress and anxiety caused
by invasive or alarming thoughts, feelings, and/or impulses, maybe he/she is
vomiting them onto you to feel untrammeled from his/her own mental traps. Maybe
you are doing this in response to his/her verifiable criticisms and complaints.
Who knows? Just suggesting all the various possibilities makes me think a lot
of chatter, garbling and mayhem must be happening. I can imagine that a lot of
the fleeting thoughts would occur:

‘I don’t feel that’

‘I don’t think this’

‘I never said that, instead you said that’

‘I am feeling this anger, because you want me to feel angry.’

‘My reckless driving was caused by your provoking it.’

Sometimes, we can be quite unaware of our worst fears about
ourselves. We can see them in our partners, and not totally realize why we are
seeing them. It becomes especially hard to diagnose the problem when we are
struggling to articulate what we are seeing and fearing. The result is
oftentimes increased confusion and anger.

As the projector, your accusatory goal can cause you to waste a
lot of time as you fixate on the wrong things and refuse to realize what is
happening in the moment. Putting your partner in a false role muddies your
communication with him/her. Think about how unreasonable you might sound to
your partner if your words are a shining example of the load of bosh you blame
him/her for. [7]

Infidelity may be a great example. If you are subconsciously
attracted to someone else outside of your relationship, and you have refused to
admit this to yourself, you may feel paranoid about your partner cheating and
so you chide him/her every time they open their text messaging inbox to talk to
others. Really, the infidelity is on you, but that seems to be too
unacceptable. You see? Trying to externalize what exists on the inside, again.

Psychological projection can be hard to escape when you are facing ambivalent emotions. If you believe that vacationing away from family responsibilities is usually selfish, but the responsibilities of your family life have become almost insufferable, thereby making you want to escape, you might try to cope with this by hauling your partner over the coals whenever he/she takes an occasional break. Again, you greatly imperil yourself with projection whenever you try to shake off parts of yourself.

Climbing the mountain to overcome psychological projection may
appear to be not for the faint of heart. But I think it is attainable for
everyone.

The force of evolution has not been totally kind to humanity.
So, have mercy on yourself as you try to manage your imperfections. To
demonstrate why, perhaps I can say that the human brain that acts as an
information-processor is analogous to the first law of thermodynamics or the
conservation of energy (matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed). The
information that enters the brain also reduces in quality and we feel like it disappears.
We forget about what we hear, see, taste, smell and touch all the time, though
information is always arguably recoverable. [8]

Stimuli from the environment that enters via our senses are
energy-based when it is encoded into brain activity. For instance, you have
layers of retinal nerve cells that fire in response to the intensity and color
of light. Photons hit the back of the eye. And you experience a thought.
Perhaps you have never thought of your thoughts as being measurable materials,
because you can only feel them and speak and write about them. They are limited
in power and scope. [8]

As an organ, the brain’s sole connection with outside reality is
through the self’s limited five senses. The brain mostly lives in fantasy,
despite how much you probably want to disagree and say you are realistic about
nearly everything you say and do. You can only input fragments from your
environment. You cannot be the panoramic spectator that you wish to be. And to
make matters worse, you are not even aware of all the fragments you are
inputting constantly. Most of the information gets drowned out by the noise and
registers outside your awareness. Raw sensory data is adulterated by your mind,
culture, relationships, tunnel vision, faulty compartmentalization, anxiety,
ego, and a smorgasbord of other things. No doubt, you cannot be totally to
blame for not seeing everything. The things about “you” that are mistaken for
“me” and “others” makes up the defense mechanism against uncomfortable
feelings, because the brain cannot afford to have its bandwidth deluged with
too much information. [8]

So, do not panic! Psychological projection has preyed on us all
at one time or another. No one is immune to it. So, have mercy on yourself and
your partner, your family, and friends. Use your projection mistakes as
opportunities to grow, to practice more self-awareness, and to strengthen your
bond with your loved ones.